I can't decide if Jenna's essay, and her writing for Jezebel as a whole, has changed my mind on this score at all, whether I think models are artists too, whether I should start paying more attention not just to the clothes but the girls who wear them. Maybe because I'm not entirely clear on what her project is, in writing about her experiences modeling. To a certain extent, I think Sauers writes about the same things that most people write about the modeling industry: about the abusive financial arrangements, the body image challenges, the use of drugs. She tends to parse intelligently what makes a girl have a memorable look. In this essay, she certainly manages to upend my blurry conceptions of what the relationships between female models are like, and how intellectual and rewarding the people in that profession can be:
I knew, when I walked into my new agency, Elite Paris, in September of 2007, that I had found my tribe. They were the sweetest, dirtiest talking, weirdest, comic-book-loving, Internet nerding, most breathtakingly cynical, tallest, hard-drinkingest, Proust-readingest, silliest, one-day-I'm-going-to-fuck-all-this-and-be-a-lawyerest, funniest, toughest crowd I'd ever run with. They were all 16 and 20 and 23, and most were amenable to staying up late and talking about Lech Walesa and the problems of teaching post-WWII history in a country where 15 years ago neighbors turned each other in to the secret police for having an extra chicken. Or they would trash talk creepy clients while drinking white wine out of 7UP bottles in the street because none of us had the money for a bar tab and the apartment was too hot.I'm sure that's true, and it does sound like a wonderful experience to meet female friends like that. Me and mine? We tend to get together on weekends and watch Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, and drink beer, and eat red velvet cake.
But I don't think anything she wrote sways me from my opinion that the people who take the pictures and make the clothes are the artists, and the models occupy an odd liminal space in the process of creating that art. Jenna says in the gallery of funny, lovely images accompanying her essay that "Often when I was modeling, I felt like I couldn't really express myself; after all, the point of a fashion model isn't that she necessarily have anything to say." I understand the photographers and viewers need an object, that clothes are almost impossible to display without living flesh and bone structures supporting them. But a form of art that demands that its practitioners empty themselves of emotion and opinion hardly seems like an art form at all, much less the problems with an art form that requires such strict control of your body on terms set by someone else. That's both what freaks me out about modeling, and why I've never been able to get too deeply interested in the details of modeling. Maybe some models get beyond that. Maybe they're bold, and scary, and fully involved, maybe they have more vision than the photographer. I don't know. I guess I hope so.
But I hope even more that people like Rei Kawakubo keep pushing, hard, the boundaries of what clothes can look like. If the clothes can change, so can the role, and the look, of the people who show us how to wear them.
(That said, Jenna's portfolio has a lot of lovely images in it, and she's a terrific magpie of a writer. Lots of gorgeous things packed into her nest. Hopefully her resurrected blog will be the same way.)